Program Details

Summary

"As practice and as theory, architecture must import and
export."
-- Bernard Tschumi1

Informal Architecture is a thematic residency in Media and
Visual Arts at The Banff Centre. For seven weeks, artists, architects, curators,
writers, designers and theorists will gather to think about, discuss, and create
works related to the representation, construction and interpretation of space.
Whether architectural, sculptural, virtual, image-based or conceptual—of special
interest will be looking at those representations or structures that exemplify a
relationship to formlessness, the unbuilt or contingent. Other analogies include
weakness, inconsistency, contingency, or failure. "Weakness" implies projects
that have not—or could not—be realized. Informal Architecture will explore
material concerns, theory, and fiction in visual and spatial culture and
architecture. Revisiting the binary opposition of form versus content, Informal
Architecture will explore new relationships to architectural history and
modernism; the dissolution of boundaries and works or ideas that are temporary,
nomadic, hypothetical, historical, and fictional conceptions of space.

Applications are welcome from artists, architects, curators,
theorists, writers, and other cultural producers to participate in the residency
in Media and Visual Arts at The Banff Centre, located in The Banff National
Park, a UNESCO world heritage site in Canada’s Rocky Mountains. The residency is
seven weeks. The thematic residency program is intended to create opportunities
for artists, designers, architects (whether registered or not), writers,
curators and theorists with shared interests to gather in a peer-to-peer
professional environment. It is not intended to prescribe a specific kind of
practice. While relevance of the artist’s work to the theme is a criterion for
acceptance, the theme should be interpreted as broadly and imaginatively as
desired.

Context

This residency will provide opportunities to research new, conceptions of
architecture and space from multiple perspectives. For 2000 years western
architecture was founded upon tenets of beauty, solidity and utility. The Tower
of Babel is an archetypal icon in literature and art (think of Breughel’s
painting) that relates the story of an architectural failure underpinned by
social experience. It is an iconographic representation of the intersection
between architecture, failure and social thought.

Since the late 1960s, conceptions of architecture have incorporated social
factors, informed by what exists—space, the body, movement, history—and their
manifestations including performance, spectacle and relationships. Theorists
such as Jurgen Habermas, after the Frankfurt School, created a means by which to
interpret the social dimensions of space and its construction, representation
and interpretation. The conceptual art projects of the 1960s and 70s paralleled
the work of "paper architects," whose projects were never meant to be realized
as built structures, but rather as hypothetical ideas which leant themselves to
critiquing traditional means and assumptions associated with architecture. It
was in the sixties, according to art historian Rosalind Krauss’s formulation
that sculpture began to play in an "expanded field" (with the development of
installation and earth works, etc). The last decade of contemporary art and
architectural practice has intensified the relationship between art and
architecture.

The inter-disciplinary within both visual art and architectural practices makes
the distinction between these fields permeable and shifting. Theorist Anthony
Vidler states, "Artists, rather than simply extending their terms of reference
to the three-dimensional, take on questions of architecture as an integral and
critical part of their work in installations that seek to criticize the
traditional terms of art. Architects, in a parallel way, are exploring the
processes and forms of art, often on the terms set out by artists, in order to
escape the rigid codes of functionalism and formalism. This intersection has
engendered a kind of "intermediary art," comprised of objects that, while
situated ostensibly in one practice, require the interpretive terms of another
for their explication." 2

If we take structures—physical or imagined spaces—as containers of memory and
cultural or social meanings, the study of space as culture opens up multiple
discourses. Informed by art, architecture, fiction, poetry, landscape,
geography, history and philosophy, this residency will look at informal
architecture as an analogical and metaphorical umbrella for understanding space.
Furthermore, with a resuscitated interest in conceptual art through the late
1990s, and widespread preoccupation with questions around space—its
construction, representation, and use in the visual arts, it is timely to
consider l’informe as a connecting theme in ideas around spatial culture.

Informal Architecture

"…l’informe is not only an adjective having a given meaning,
but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring
that each things have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense
and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for
academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of
philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is,
a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe
resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is
something like a spider or spit."
-- Georges Bataille 3

Informal Architecture will encompass multiple methodologies of
studying that which is, either intentionally or not, formless or lacking,
contingent, imperfect, temporary, unbuilt, weak. The unbuilt has associations
with recent theory of l’informe (formless). First proposed by Georges
Bataille, l’informe breaks down the binary thinking of form versus
content which dominated modern art.

This research was explored in the Centre Pompidou exhibition L’informe:
Mode d-emploi (1996), curated by Rosalind Kraus and Yves-Alain Bois.
Bataille’s conception of spatial destruction, and anti-architectural matter such
as spittle, finds an echo within the clear gestures of Gordon Matta-Clark’s
"splitting." There are direct links between popular culture and public space as
sites of social communication. Both popular culture and public spaces structure
and also conceal the processes of cultural representation. Matta-Clark saw his
cuts as opening up social information. "’By undoing a building,’ Matta-Clark
said, ‘[I] open a state of enclosure which had been preconditioned not only by
physical necessity but by the industry that [proliferates] suburban and urban
boxes as a context for insuring a passive isolated consumer.’ Matta-Clark noted
that in his work Splitting, "What the cutting’s done is to make the space
more articulated, but the identity of the building as a place, as an object, is
strongly preserved, enhanced." 5

* * *

Through the 1980s the feminist deconstruction of space proposed a
re-examination of assumptions around space as a gendered construction. The work
of Canadian artist Rita McKeough is particularly relevant. In a series of
performances and gallery installations that saw the artist tear apart walls—at
times eating these structures—we are reminded particularly of Bataille’s
connection between spittle and destruction of spaces. Working from a feminist
perspective, McKeough’s work resonates with the l’informe.

Architectural theorist Anthony Vidler states, "Folds, blobs, nets, skins,
diagrams: all words that have been employed to describe theoretical and design
procedures over the last decade, and that have rapidly replaced the cuts, rifts,
faults and negations of deconstruction, which had previously displaced the
types, signs, structures and morphologies of rationalism. The new vocabulary has
something to do with contemporary interest in the l'informe…" 6

The work of architects Herzog & de Meuron, who count art gallery exhibitions
as integral to their work, reflects an association with the transient and
contingent. Herzog & de Meuron are attracted to "structures that appear as if
they may be disassembled at any time." 7
The Blur Building (2002), "an inhabitable cloud," created by a mist of
tiny water particles, created by architects Diller + Scofidio, echoes the
Bubble Machines (1964—95) of artist David Medalla. Medalla’s sculptures,
sometimes created on the facades of buildings, oozed foam from minimalist
sculpture. "…The emerging foam disturbingly exceeded these orderly and static
forms and introduced a completely new, kinetic and organic understanding of the
cellular and repetitive. In fact the structure of the Bubble Machine was
dialectical at both formal and philosophical levels. Creation proceeded
inseparably from destruction, the fullness and monumentality of form was
accompanied by its complete evaporation, it was simultaneously a material
‘something’ and an immaterial ‘nothing.’" 8

L’informe has a relationship with other recent theory around
abjection, lack and weakness that proliferated in the 1990s contemporary art
world, under such labels as "the pathetic aesthetic." Little of this theme was
expressed in terms of failure specifically related architecture. In broad terms
postmodernism itself proposed a questioning of modernism’s inherent "universal"
themes of transcendence and mastery. As unfashionable as it may now be to
mention deconstruction, does the word itself not summarize the idea of "unbuilding"?

Unbuilding

In 1969, Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostell published Fantastic Architecture
with the groundbreaking Something Else Press. In this delicious volume,
contemporary artists were asked to create proposals for architecture that
exceeded the possibilities of orthodox designs for spaces.

In the book Unbuilt America, George R. Collins wrote, "The major
categories of unbuiltness would appear to be (1) not carried out as planned; (2)
not really intended by its instigator to be "done"; and (3) begun but never
completed. The first would be considered to be a negative situation (although
the intention would appear quite positive), the second to be a positive
situation (although the intention would appear to be quite negative), and the
third to be half-and-half." 9

Similarly, in 1997 curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Guy Tortosa published
Unbuilt Roads: 107 Unrealized Projects in which artists presented projects
in the visual arts that, for a variety of reasons, were not realized. The
curators wrote, "Unlike unrealized architectural models and projects submitted
for competitions, which are frequently published, endeavours in the visual arts
that are planned but not carried out ordinarily remain unnoticed or little
known." 10

The idea of imagining the impossible in architecture lends itself to the
practice of fiction. To propose the impossible, or even the unlikely, implies a
pre-determined failure of sorts, but fiction provides an avenue for creative
expression freed from applied design or built realities.

Virtuality

Virtual reality’s popularity through the 1990s opened up new discourses in
architecture, from building and imagining virtual environments, to quasi-applied
"bubble architecture," where the plans for structures that could only be made
with the assistance of computers and complex algorithms spawned an entire
culture of bubble architects. "Both the new vocabulary and its materializations
intersect with and take their techniques from digital technology; indeed many of
the projected and built designs would be unrealizable, if not unimaginable,
without it. They are words and forms conceived and manipulated in a virtual
space, with, nevertheless, an intimate relationship to production techniques and
the technology of materials." 11

But the impracticalities of virtual reality led to a burst bubble, as implied by
the French filmmaker Chris Marker: "Virtual reality is extremely fashionable
these days. Now to be frank, to obtain something manageable in that field you
need a lot of hardware and know-how. It occurred to me that, for the average
user, there is an acceptable approximation to Virtuality, namely Reality,
otherwise know as Outside World." 12

Social

Social and identity politics of the 1980s and 90s also questioned the moral
assumptions implied by the work of artists and architects. Questions of inherent
rights and land claims in Canada by Aboriginal peoples made the politics of
space present in the consciousness of society at large, questions that remain
largely unresolved. Furthermore, ideas of nomadism and psychogeography made
popular by French theorists, (Deleuze and Guttari and the Situationists_, seldom
discuss the traditional knowledge and contemporary experiences of Indigenous
cultures who are nomads by choice or political realities, and have centuries of
experience with nomadism.

All of these critiques of space—whether physical, social, feminist,
psychoanalytical, or technological—imply a desire or necessity for unbuilding.
Failure, as it implies a desire to not realize, an inadequacy, contingency, or
desire to destroy, is a port manteau for the unbuilt. Through this
research one can discover how weakness can be enabling, and dismantle binary
structures.

Popular

While this residency will explore a series of questions of vital interest to
artists, these questions are ultimately relateable and relevant to broader
publics. The unbuilt in this context extends beyond the literal sense of weak
structures—although the resonances of architectural catastrophes are notable
here following September 11, 2001. In the popular imagination, this might be
represented in collective memory by media images of the World Trade Center
collapsing, resonating the Tower of Babel. Such icons of loss and disaster are
emblematic of how the subjects of this residency touch on knowledge that extends
beyond the proceedings of a specialist community, to a study of space in the
popular imagination. In this way Informal Architecture elicits our
nightmares, dreams and desires.

All programs, faculty, dates, fees, and offers of financial assistance are subject to change. Program fee subject to applicable taxes. Non-refundable fees and deposits will be retained upon cancellation. Any other fees are refunded at the discretion of The Banff Centre.